She Makes It Look Easy

by Marybeth Whalen

  “I really hate to hear that, Liza.” I fumbled for the right words to say, words that didn’t sound too pitiful or too hopeless. Just because someone else dared to audition for a part that I sang every year—that everyone knew was mine—well, that didn’t mean she would get the part.

  Liza read my mind. “Now, I don’t think that this means anything, but I did want to warn you, just so you could be mentally prepared.” She clucked her tongue sympathetically. “I mean, I’d want to know if I were you.”

  “Well, yes, yes, of course,” I said, even as my mind scanned through the women in the church who might possibly try to take my part from me. I always sang the closing solo as the church overflowed with every child from the children’s program, waving little flags. It was the high point of the whole service. Everyone cried as I filled that entire sanctuary with my voice, feeling about as good as I thought possible as I sang “God Bless America.” When it was over, I always got a standing ovation. People spent the rest of the year telling me how touched they were by my singing and those little children all blending together in one spectacular display. There was rarely a dry eye in the house. One thing I knew: There would be many disappointed people if someone else sang that part. It had become part of people’s Fourth of July tradition. I could think of no one who would attempt such a thing. Not even Geraldine Cleavis, who sang the solo in the Christmas program every year. Christmas, it was understood, was her turf. Fourth of July was mine.

  “Do you know who it was?” I asked Liza. “Who auditioned?”

  “Well, that’s the funny thing. It’s some new woman, new to the church. I mean, it would have to be someone new. Someone who doesn’t know who you are. I mean, you’re the next Dorothy Rea.”

  Being compared to Dorothy Rea was the ultimate compliment in our church. Too old to do much of anything now, Dorothy walked slowly into every event to a standing ovation. There was a new wing and a women’s event named after her. She was once the leader of everything at the church and the epitome of a godly woman. Everyone in our church wanted to be the Dorothy Rea of our generation. Liza had paid me quite a compliment and I stammered out my thanks. I had always secretly hoped that was how people saw me.

  Liza went on talking while I reassured myself that my part was sewn up and no newcomer could take it from me. “You don’t think it’s the people who bought Laura’s house, do you?” Liza asked. “Wouldn’t that be so weird?” She almost sounded happy as she asked, as though the irony was delicious and she wanted to enjoy the flavor, roll it around on her tongue.

  I strode over to the window and pushed the plantation shutters back to look at the empty house that sat exactly behind mine. There was no sign of life there yet. The house had that soulless quality that overtakes all empty houses. I noticed a lone plant, grown spindly and dry from lack of care, on the empty deck. “No, no, it couldn’t be her. No one’s moved in over there yet.”

  I had already decided not to like whoever moved in, even though Laura assured me it was a nice family. No one could take my best friend’s place. In fact, as soon as Liza and I hung up, I was going to call her. We hadn’t talked in a week. She was busy getting her new life set up in Chicago, trying to fit in with a bunch of Yankees, and I was here, still avoiding looking at her house because it was too painful to see the shell of a place I had once spent half my time in. I kept the shutters closed along the back of the house and hoped Mark didn’t complain. He never did. Mark wasn’t one to complain about much.

  “Well, I’ll let you get back to whatever it was you were doing before I interrupted you,” Liza said. “I don’t know how you do all you do with those little girls and your work at the church and the school and the neighborhood. Whoever does move in is going to be very lucky to have you for a neighbor.”

  I thanked Liza and said good-bye. I dialed Laura’s number and hoped I’d catch her at a good time. Lately she’d been too busy to talk. We’d promised that the distance wasn’t going to cause a chasm in our friendship, but I was starting to doubt it. Yet she was the only person I felt I could be even halfway honest with. I wanted to tell Laura about the person who was after my part, about how things were bad for Mark at work and that he was getting on my nerves with his down-in-the-mouth attitude. Before we hung up, Liza had told me she’d pray for me. I told her I could always use prayers. But if someone else got my part, I was going to need a lot more than prayers. I was going to need a restraining order.

  A week later, I had the table set beautifully and the food all finished at precisely the same time—one of the signs of an accomplished cook, if you asked me. I stepped back and inhaled deeply. A perfect summer meal sat waiting. But Mark was late and the food was cooling. “Girls, dinner,” I called. “Cameron. Caroline.”

  I heard a flurry of motion upstairs as they flung down whatever it was they were playing with and came down the stairs. Caroline, my younger daughter, twirled and jetéed down the stairs. Cameron pretended she was riding a horse. “Can I take horseback this year, Mom? Can I please?” she asked as soon as she trotted into the room. “Jillian’s taking horseback, and she said I totally should too.” At eight, she was already talking like a teenager.

  A thought skittered across my mind: If things kept going the way they had been, we wouldn’t be able to keep paying for ballet, much less add horseback. Financial problems used to be something that happened to other people. “We’ll see,” I said to Cameron. I pointed her toward the table. “Did you wash your hands?” I asked before she could land in the seat. She beamed at me and nodded.

  I took my place at the table and commenced with serving their plates. Caroline looked toward Mark’s empty place. “Where’s Daddy? Why aren’t we waiting on him?” she asked.

  I didn’t look over at her, just kept dishing out the grilled chicken, the twice-baked potatoes, and the salad, with the homemade yeast rolls. It was too bad I wasn’t hungry. I cut up Caroline’s meat and started in on Cameron’s before she protested that she could do it herself, so I gave it back.

  “Mommy? Where’s Daddy?” Caroline asked again, accepting her plate complete with bite-size pieces of chicken courtesy of me. “We should wait for him.” She looked down at her plate. “I don’t like salad.”

  “Eat three bites,” I responded automatically. She had to know by this time I would respond that way, that I always told her to eat three bites. Sometimes I felt that motherhood was nothing more than automatic pilot, repeating the same words over and over like a robot. No one said anything while we ate our food. Hours of work that disappeared in ten minutes, fifteen if you threw in some family conversation. Lately I wondered why I tried so hard.

  We heard the sound of the garage door going up and a car pulling in. The girls’ eyes widened, and their forks clattered to the plates as they bolted for the door, calling, “Daddy! Daddy!” I stayed at the table, focusing on the centerpiece I had created the week before: sand and shells in a hurricane vase, two open clam shells with white votives tucked inside on either side of the vase. I had forgotten to light the candles.

  “Hi,” Mark said.

  I looked up at him, remembering my mother’s advice to always greet my husband like a conquering hero when he returned home from work, to stand, to hug, to smile. I stood and went to the cupboard to retrieve a lighter. “Hi,” I said. I forced myself to go over to him, to wrap my arms around him like a robot. All these years and I was still hoping the love would come with the action.

  The girls took their seats, and Mark laid down his briefcase and suit jacket just inside the doorway where it didn’t belong. Later I would have to move it. He took his seat at the table as I lit the votives and smiled. Our eyes locked, and my smile disappeared like a flame being extinguished. Every day I said I would do better, would fake it to the point that he believed it, that I believed it. And every day by the time he came in the door, I just didn’t have the energy to play pretend. We both looked down at our pl
ates. The food had become cold, but I didn’t offer to heat his up. He didn’t say a word about it, but for some reason I wanted him to.

  Cameron had opened the kitchen shutters that afternoon when she was coloring, and I could see Laura’s house from where I sat. A man was on the deck fiddling with the umbrella on a dilapidated table that had seen better days. The man was handsome—good build, a strong jaw, a thick shock of black hair. I wondered if his eyes were brown or green or blue. A little boy with red hair ran up and down the stairs while the man worked. He stopped working to speak to the boy. A woman came out the door that led from the den to the deck. I looked away before my mind could register what she looked like.

  “So, Caroline, tell Daddy that story about what Ellie did at camp today,” I said. I looked over at Mark. “Ellie is the Stewart girl,” I explained. He nodded and put on his interested face as he turned to listen to Caroline animatedly tell the long and involved story I’d already listened to that day. My mind wandered back to my conversation with Laura. I’d finally gotten to talk to her after a week of trying. I felt a momentary pang for what had floated through the phone lines as I told her about my troubles.

  “I feel like you left me,” I said before we had hung up.

  She sighed, as though my admission exhausted her. “You know I wouldn’t have left you …,” she said, “if I didn’t have to.”

  “I feel like everything’s changed since you left,” I said. “I need you to be right where you were.”

  “No one ever stays right where you need them to be,” Laura said.

  My eyes flickered back to her house. The people were gone, but signs of life were there. Outdoor furniture, though ugly, now filled the deck. The dead plant had been removed, replaced by a fern. I always thought that a house without a family was like a body without a soul. Would it be better for Laura’s house to be filled rather than empty? Would I rather hold vigil over a soulless house, some kind of memorial to a lost friendship? Caroline finished her story, and I turned to Mark.

  “So, I heard from the church,” I said. I had to tell him, and it would be easier since I’d told Laura earlier.

  He looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “And?” He still had his interested face on.

  I looked down at my plate, moved around my untouched food. “They gave the part to that other person.” I hadn’t even bothered to learn her name. What did her identity matter?

  I felt his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed gently. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I sat that way for a long time, letting him massage my shoulder, willing his touch to break through the steel I felt sheathed in. When it didn’t work, I stood up and went to the sink with my plate, washing the uneaten food down the garbage disposal and watching it disappear.

  In my dream I heard a dog barking. I looked from room to room in our house for the dog but couldn’t find it. I racked my brain to remember when we had gotten a dog, wondering how the girls had talked me into it. I had never wanted the mess, the hair, the added responsibility. Even in the dream I was questioning myself, wondering what emotionally weak moment had ushered a dog into my home. I opened the door to my bedroom to discover the dog sitting in my bed, his mouth stretched into what could only be described as a grin.

  Before my eyes he changed into a lion and roared, a sound that woke me with a start, looking around to discover that I had fallen asleep in the middle of the day on my living-room couch. I lay there blinking and looking around for a moment, trying to remember what I was doing before I had fallen asleep. I came home from dropping off the girls at day camp. I was going to mix up some bread dough and do my exercise DVD. Fatigue had settled over me so powerfully I had staggered to the couch to lie down, the last thing I remembered.

  Then I heard a dog barking just like in my dream and sat up. Was I going crazy? Was I sick? I wasn’t the type to sleep during the day. Nor was I the type to hear things. I stood and went toward the direction of the barking. It was coming from the garage. I opened the door to the garage and peered into the darkness. I sighed with relief when I saw that the garage door was closed—that I hadn’t forgotten to close it. I was about to go back inside when I heard the jingle of a dog collar and the clicks of dog toenails hitting the cement floor. Before I could close the door, a big black Lab stepped into the light from the doorway looking awfully happy to see me. I stooped down, and he walked slowly toward me, stretching and shaking out his four legs as he did. He had no collar on but looked well fed. Someone in our neighborhood—some irresponsible pet owner—had lost their dog, and he had somehow gotten into my garage.

  Because I couldn’t think of what else to do, I swung the door open and invited my guest in. Laura had a dog, a blonde cocker spaniel she had named Mopsy. Mopsy had been a guest at my house so many times I started keeping little dog biscuits for her. I was glad I hadn’t had the heart to throw them out yet. I motioned for the dog to follow me into the kitchen where I kept them. He did, his eyes looking at me with trust and warmth. Maybe I’d been wrong telling the girls no about a dog. Maybe I needed the companionship. I imagined calling Laura to tell her that, in her absence, I’d decided to get a dog. And not just any dog, but a big black Lab. “So let me get this straight,” I imagined her saying, “I’ve been replaced by a canine.” I smiled at the image as I opened the canister and threw two biscuits toward the dog. He caught them in midair and swallowed them without chewing, that doggy smile on his face. Then he ambled over and sat at my feet, pushing his head into my knees.

  I bent down and scratched his ears, soft as peach fuzz, wondering what to do. He looked up at me, opened his mouth, and panted. “Oh, boy, you must be thirsty,” I said, and he kept staring at me like I was on the right track. I put water in a bowl and set it before him, then took a seat at the kitchen table to watch him drink it. Without the frenzy of getting ready for the Patriotic Pageant at church, I had less to keep me busy. I needed a purpose to distract me from the two losses I had just stomached. It felt like emotional indigestion.

  The dog finished the water and came to rest by my feet, his big body splayed out on the cool kitchen floor. For a moment I let myself think about Laura really being gone, about my part really being sung by another woman. I thought about how last year I had sung in the pageant with Laura in the audience, never realizing that just one year later she’d be gone and so would my part. A single tear slipped down my face and I let it fall into the dog’s fur. He didn’t even look up as I slunk down on the floor beside him and wrapped my arms around his big furry body—not even caring that he smelled like he’d spent the morning trapped in my garage. I buried my face in his neck and let a few more tears fall, grateful I wasn’t alone.

  Chapter 3

  Ariel

  The music wasn’t doing the trick. I couldn’t hear it over the din of the boys’ thundering feet, riotous squeals, and intermittent bouts of crying. I looked mournfully at the bank of boxes waiting to be unpacked along the den wall and strained to hear the music coming from the portable CD player David had set up for me before he left. Shaking my head, I turned it off, sat down in the middle of the floor, and put my head in my hands. I figured maybe I could shed a few tears and relieve some of the stress that way. As I held my hands over my eyes, one of the boys zipped by me. “Sorry, Mom,” he yelled as his makeshift sword clunked against the back of my head. Duncan.

  I grew up believing that if you put a little music on, every job got easier. When I was in middle school and my mom assigned me the arduous task of cleaning my room, I cranked up DeBarge and danced around to “Rhythm of the Night” while I sorted the stuffed animals I couldn’t bear to part with (which seemed to multiply in the recesses of my room) and tried to organize my closet into submission. When I moved into my dorm at college, my roommate, Karen, and I bobbed our heads along with Bob Marley’s Legend album while we turned the tiny space into what we thought was a place of beauty. Now we joke that it looked like Lau
ra Ashley threw up peach and blue. Later, when David and I were newly married and worked together to strip the heinous wallpaper in our first house, I put on U2 and we both sang along to “Beautiful Day,” working side by side, just like I had always imagined married life would be—a series of beautiful days unspooling like ribbon.

  But this? This was not anything like what I had imagined all those years ago as David and I balanced on our stools and talked of the future. For one thing, I pictured David around, not off earning a living and traveling constantly for his job, leaving me to fend for myself and care for the wild hooligans we had created. I don’t know why it never entered my mind that if David worked, someone else (me) would have to stay home and actually take care of the children we had imagined. Feed them. Hold them. Take them to places like the library and the doctor’s office and the grocery store. Wipe their faces. Clean up their messes.

  “Mama?”

  Duncan, my youngest’s, voice. I looked up.

  “Yes, baby?”

  “You crying?” The look of concern on his face was unbearably sweet.

  “Trying to,” I said as I rose from my place on the floor. I had hunkered down in the only spot that wasn’t covered by boxes. I dusted off the jeans I was wearing, David’s jeans, the ones with the hole in the knee that he tried to donate and I rescued for such occasions as this.

  “You miss our old house, Mama? That why you’re crying?” Duncan continued. Somehow he’d gotten strawberry blonde hair in spite of my auburn hair and David’s black hair; found it in the depths of our gene pool, making him look part baby, part angel with the wisps flying around his head like an orb of light. At four he was losing his baby look, but his hair still reminded me of an angel’s.

  “No, honey. Mommy doesn’t miss our old house.”